mission

I tried to come up with a bit of a mission statement for my blog, and this is what I have so far. It’s a work in progress!

Many blogs can be put into one of two categories:

1. How to stop spending money: how to reduce debt, how to save for a home, how to save for retirement, how to reduce costs for families, how to be frugal, etc.
2. How to start spending money: advice on investing, how to buy real estate, how to generate extra income, how to spend your money wisely on product X, and so on.

I put myself in the middle of these two categories, and I have a different goal in mind: Relaxed Finance™. For someone like myself, there are two paradigms in conflict in my life and the goal is how to balance them. They are:

• I make a lot of money, and I am debt free and well on my way to having adequate savings for retirement, but the generation of this income takes a lot of time. My lifestyle is far from opulent, but I have certain minimum expectations regarding security, health and fun.
• The most precious currency I have is time. Buying back my time is not cheap, but it is possible. Deciding how much to buy back means sacrifices for the first paradigm: spending two hours a week less at work means, for me as a consultant, two less hours of billing and maybe means I have to cut back on my fun (those two hours might pay for a dinner out, for example).

So compared to many personal finance blogs, I plan to focus more on how to minimize finance as an area of focus in my life. I plan to stay fully aware of it, but it will not be the organizing principle of my life, and frugality, for example, will lose out in some cases to the convenience of time. I will not drive an extra 5 miles to get cheaper gas, for example – I’ll stop at the station on the way home.

I know this concept will sound ridiculous to someone with heavy debt: this advice isn’t for them. But anyone who lives in an urban area and thinks they’ll be able to retire by the time they are 50 by no longer buying lattes at Starbucks are kidding themselves. If you live in San Francisco, or Chicago, or Miami or New York, you will never retire until you have worked long enough to pay off your million-dollar two bedroom – unless you are willing to relocate to a smaller town. But if you plan to live in a major urban area, you’ll have to continue to trade your time for money, while fighting all the time to minimize the amount of the trade by reducing commute times, automating your financial life and giving up on luxuries. Through all of this, the goal is to live life to its fullest. That’s what my concept of Relaxed Finance™ is all about, and that’s what Brip Blap is all about.